


Anachronism

by sister_coyote



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Character Study, Ficlet, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-29
Updated: 2006-08-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:58:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_coyote/pseuds/sister_coyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was the little things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anachronism

It was never the big things that threw him off—always and only the little ones. It helped that his family had been dead before his long sleep. His friends had mostly been fellow-Turks, comrades in arms and drinking buddies, and they were almost certainly dead now. (The motto of the Turks had been and would ever be 'Live fast, die young, and leave a corpse made unrecognizable by fire, acid, explosion, drowning, gunshot to the head, and/or multiple stab wounds.')

So there were no friends now old to bring him up sharp against the long gap in his life. And world events seemed too far distant to rock him out of the deep grooves of habit he tread.

It was the little things that did that.

Just as well he'd never cared to keep up with fashion, because time had left him in the dust. The style now was earth tones, decorative straps, and zippers everywhere. He would have sworn that there'd been more color in clothing thirty years before. Thirty years had also given the world terrible and delightful technology; the fall of Shinra had taken many of them away again. He felt sometimes that the world was a mausoleum for wonders he'd never known. When he'd gone into his sleep, the fashion in music had been for slow romantic ballads with a lot of guitar, or for heavy rock with a distinctive bass beat. You hardly heard either, anymore.

So he was startled to realize that he recognized the music coming tinnily from Tifa's cheap stereo, the music she hummed along to as she washed glasses. It wasn't a very good song. It had annoyed him, in fact, because it was playing everywhere all the time that summer that he was twenty-five. Always on the damn radio, and his partner had insisted on choosing the station in the car, so he'd learned every saccharine warble by heart, like it or not.

He couldn't remember what the song was, but damned if it didn't seem a lot better now, if only for the familiarity. "What is that?" he asked.

"It's called 'Sunlight and Vines,'" Tifa said, and laughed a little. "My mother used to play it all the time, when I was a little girl. I was so glad when I found a recording. It reminds me of home." Her mouth twisted up, wistful.

His expression didn't change—he had learned to wear his own skin like a mask years before, and it wasn't something that you turned off easily—but he knew his own voice was wistful when he said, "It reminds me of home, also."

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at [Livejournal](http://sister-coyote.livejournal.com/5057.html) and [Dreamwidth](http://sister-coyote.dreamwidth.org/72260.html).


End file.
